Displaying 1 - 10 of 41 articles

2017 is to be the year advocacy. In January, millions took to the streets in the worldwide women’s marches. The new US president’s executive order which brought about a visa ban for citizens of a number…

Jupiter, as seen from my garden in Sydney. The spacecraft Juno will soon be getting a closer view.
Andy CaselyJune 20, 2016

You’ve all heard the Planets Suite, right? Seven classical pieces that Gustav Holst used to ‘describe’ each of the known planets. I’ve always found the Jupiter piece a bit odd – the beginning is a little…

It’s not everyday that you get to discover something new. But when you do it is a rather strange and quite brilliant feeling. You don’t really cry out ‘Eureka’ (there’s usually about a million things going…

The icy mountains of Pluto tower above their surroundings, but would they be any good to ski on?
NASA-JHUAPL-SwRIMarch 22, 2016

Just think, this time last year we knew next to nothing about Pluto. It was a fuzzy blob, with even the Hubble Space Telescope struggling to make it out. Fast forward to earlier today where in a press…

Ice volcanoes have shaped my life, and until today I didn’t even know if they actually existed. Now, thanks to NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, there’s a good chance we’ve found a frozen volcanic cone on…

If you can grow potatoes here, why not on Mars?
Helen Maynard-CaselySeptember 23, 2015

This is not as odd a question as it sounds, and by next week I reckon a good lot of you will be pondering it. Why? Well the 30th September sees the opening of The Martian in Australia, director Ridley…

It’s now been over a month since the New Horizons spacecraft flew by one of the last unknown outposts of our solar system and although we’ve only just seen a trickle of the data it collected, it has all…

NASA has now formally started to pack its bags for the next big discovery mission, this time heading to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Last month NASA announced the instruments that will fly on this trip and…

As our attention is drawn to the far distant parts of our planetary neighbourhood, it is worth reminding ourselves that there’s still much to learn in our local area of the solar system. Although most…